


you fit into me (like a hook into an eye)

by MustafaSuzzivan



Category: Dear White People (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-03-11 01:23:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13513830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MustafaSuzzivan/pseuds/MustafaSuzzivan
Summary: In the seconds after Kurt kissed her, Sam noticed that he looked about as shocked as she felt. Those seconds stretched out into an entire torturous minute before she finally found words to put to the moment…“Are you fucking kidding me?!”





	you fit into me (like a hook into an eye)

Sam knew how to handle trolls. She had to learn pretty fucking fast when she first went live with Dear White People. The minute they figured out what she was about, their twitchy little trigger fingers got to work – calling in to her show; commenting on her blog; messaging her through _every available_ social media channel...after weeks of trying and failing to debate them into submission, to act like some of the more aggressively misogynoir shit didn't get to her, Joelle helped put together a three-step strategy for maintaining sanity...

  1. Block the boring ones
  2. Put the interesting ones on blast
  3. Block their dumb asses too



Sadly for Sam, there was no **Block** option with which to silence life-sized trolls. And Kurt turned out to be a particularly persistent one… 

She first encountered him when he and his goons invaded the Armstrong-Parker dining hall. Sam was holding court in an already touchy discussion between Troy’s table and hers, but Kurt ‘My Father Will Hear About This’ Fletcher decided he _had_ to inject his agenda into it too.

“ _Blah, blah, blah, affirmative action – blah, blah, blah, Obama is President – blah, blah, blah_ , _it’s so hard to be_ _a straight white guy in America –”_

If Sam had seen it in a comments section she would have laughed it off and kept it moving. But standing before the white privilege poster boy of Winchester, and glaring into his smug punchable face, made her muscles ripple with the kind of anger no internet bigot had ever provoked.

Sam promptly slapped his tray to the ground and told him to get the fuck out, for the first of many times…

That was probably a mistake. Not because his daddy was President, but because she had reacted rather dramatically to his baiting.

Sam knew that trolls thrived on attention, and the only way to weaken them was to starve them of it. But she _couldn’t_ do that in real life. She couldn’t walk away from a fight, because then people might actually think he was right. And that was what made him so perversely effective. If he called her out in public she had to respond; she _had to_ prove him wrong. She had to **win** goddamn it. Even it meant doing something a little crazy. Fuck it, a Pyrrhic victory was better than none at all…

So Sam came to a decision. Kurt might be a formidable troll, and she might not be able to block him out. But she didn’t want or need to.

Because she'd found a way to beat him at his own game…

 

*******

If Kurt really stopped to think about it, they kind of needed each other. Like Lennon and McCartney, or whiskey and cigars, or chicken and waffles. Great individually, sure, but _so much better_ together. Sam didn’t see it that way, of course, because her story needed a villain. And he happily filled the role, because pissing her off was fun.

Honestly, she had no one to blame for the DWP party but herself, and not just because she sent the damn invite. Kicking him out of the AP dining hall for trying to start a conversation?  Comparing Winchester to a plantation? Raging against the integration of their house like it would take something away instead of just adding something new?

She could be completely unreasonable sometimes. And satire was the weapon of reason…

“Is anybody else sick of talking about Sam?” Gordon drawled, leaning away from the table. “’Cause we talk about her a lot. Like…more than we talk about our girlfriends.”  

Pastiche was holding their first meeting since the party; since Sam admitted loudly and proudly to hacking their Facebook page (" _You chose **Pa$tiche** as our password?!_ " Kurt had yelled at Mitch, their so-called Social Media Manager). The Garmin House dining room was starting to feel like a hotbox, with smoke curling to the ceiling, and pressing against the walls, so Kurt got up to let some air in.

“Oprah and Bernie Sanders had a secret love child,” he said, leaning against the windowsill. “And now she’s running around this proud American institution like a little despot, trying to stifle our right to free speech. This is important. This is a _defining moment._ So focus the fuck up and pitch me something for our next cover story.”

 _Something that will piss off Sam in particular_ , he thought, then tried to unthink, because Gordon was looking at him in a way that made him wonder if an actual thought bubble had appeared over his head. 

Maybe that was just the weed talking…

 

*******

 

Sam never ever talked about her father, with anyone but Joelle. Even then, it was only because he had a heart attack, and she needed a friend to help her cope. But when her mom called to say he came out of surgery okay; when the man himself got on the phone to tease her about being worried, Gabe was sitting next to her. And all of a sudden she found herself telling him stuff she almost forgot.

Like how her dad took her to school sometimes, and walked with her to homeroom, holding her hand the whole way. And how parents and teachers and kids would _stare_ , wondering what this little black girl was doing with a white man. And how the weight of their gaze got to be too much one day, and it made her break away and run ahead of him, refusing to look back. Papa White always said she was ‘independent’, even at nine, but she just didn’t want people looking at them anymore… 

At first Gabe seemed surprised by her opening up, eyebrows disappearing under the fringe of curly dark hair. Then understanding dawned, and he drew her to him, and Sam was kind of glad she said it...

When Al slapped the lawn jockey issue of Pastiche on her desk, Sam had to take several deep breaths and remind herself that she did _not_ hate all white people. Not her dad, or Gabe, or J.K. Rowling, or Stevie Nicks, or the mailman back home who looked just like Santa…

**DO YOU KNOW WHY THIS MAKES YOU ANGRY?**

“ _Well, if you don’t know, now you know_ ,” Sam muttered, days after Reggie got a gun pulled on him. After it came out that her boyfriend called the cops. After Kurt had the nerve to show up in AP House, and talk about how ‘fucked up’ the whole thing was, before trying to recruit her to Pastiche, and calling the blackface party their first collaboration.

Sam assured him that she would never **ever** work with him, throwing in a few more ‘ _ever_ ’s for good measure.    

“So…you’ll think about it and get back to me,” she heard him say as she walked away, and it was all she could do to keep from doubling back and slapping him upside the head.

Back in her dorm, she tossed the magazine in the trash, and tried to focus on taking the fight to the administration…

When Reggie texted to suggest they hand out their town hall protest posters at the Griffin Week parade (“ _School spirit my ass. They don’t get to paper over what happened with a fuckin’ pep rally_ "), Sam found herself hesitating before she agreed, a little too enthusiastically.

Every interaction between them had become loaded. Because he wasn’t just her friend anymore. He was the guy she supposedly strung along, the guy whose trauma she commandeered for the cause, the guy she betrayed Gabe with. Worst of all, she knew damn well that never would have happened if she hadn’t been caught up in the emotion of him almost becoming a martyr…

The parade was a welcome distraction. Troy and Lionel were there, of course, but before she could get more than a few practiced jabs in at her ex he pointed out that their I CAN’T BREATHE posters said ‘I CAN’T BREATH’. Reggie seemed less upset about the screw up than she was, focusing instead on how cute and serious he thought she looked…

Sam cringed internally as Troy and Lionel gave them pointed looks. And when Kurt showed up a moment later, she was almost ashamed of how relieved she felt…

At first he focused his baiting on Troy, damning his speech with faint praise, and offering him a place on the Pastiche writing staff. Sam interjected, brimming with smirky sarcasm, and he responded in kind, like this was all just a routine they’d rehearsed a hundred times.

“ _God, our repartee is magic_ ,” he sighed, suggesting once again that she should work with him.

He seemed completely unmoved when she gave him the finger instead and walked away. But she regretted it almost immediately, as Reggie turned the conversation back to what happened between them…

“… _we had a moment_ …”

“… _we both got caught up_ …”

“… _I’m **still** caught up_ …”

Ugh.

Sam suggested they head back for the rest of the rally. She didn’t get enough footage, what with all the…distractions. And they might as well hand out the rest of their misspelled posters…

But when they got to the barricade separating the crowd from the parade, somebody else was handing something out. Copies of the latest Pastiche, **EDITED BY THE BLACK STUDENT UNION**. The guy that gave it to her had duct tape over his mouth (bearing the words I CAN’T BREATH), but she could still see his smirk underneath.

“ _This is some bullshit_ ,” Reggie muttered over her shoulder as she flipped through pages, practically tearing them out.

In the center was an article (EDITED BY SAMANTHA WHITE) with almost everything redacted, except for a few scattered words that added up to ‘white people suck’.

" _I knew I’d see your byline in there soon enough_.”

She looked up to see Kurt putting tape over his grinning mouth, waggling his eyebrows as he reached over her head to hand someone else a copy…

And something in Sam just - _fucking_ \- **snapped**.

In hindsight, diving over the barrier and trying to rip the magazines from his hands kind of gave credibility to the claim that she was anti-free speech. The smile in his eyes as he looked down at her, holding the issues aloft, told Sam that she lost this fight…

She wasn’t proud of it.

But she _was_ glad that it gave her something else to talk about with Reggie…

*******

 

President Fletcher and Dean Fairbanks had been engaged in a twisted game of chess, on and off since the 70s. Since they both started working at Winchester. Since their sons were born…

Growing up, Kurt and Troy were like cousins that hung out on holidays, or birthdays, but didn’t really interact otherwise. Their perfunctory rivalry wasn’t fueled by any of the animosity their fathers had harbored all these years, so they just kind of…existed around each other. Kurt figured the stakes were never really that high for them because they had totally different life plans.

Troy was going to graduate summa cum laude (like his father), marry some respectable, presentable (preferably ethnic) chick, then run for office and win. Kurt was going to do just enough to graduate (like his father), get a writing gig on SNL or some network comedy, then watch the groupies and celebrities roll in on a wave of whiskey and weed.  

There wasn’t a lot of overlap between those two paths. Nothing to get competitive over.

In fact, Troy only ever had one thing that interested Kurt. And that was Sam.

They dated for all of five minutes before Dean Fairbanks put a stop to it. Apparently she was more Che Guevara than Michelle Obama in his eyes…

“ _Sucks to be him_ ,” Kurt had commented, idly perusing the bookshelf in his father’s office. “She’s pretty hot.”

“ _Don’t even go there_.”  

“Go where?” Kurt asked, half laughing. “It was just an observation, Christ. Besides…she’s not even into white guys. She wrote a whole article about it.”

“And _you_ wrote a whole article about your first interracial sexual encounter,” President Fletcher noted, not looking up from his work. 

“Oh, so you _do_ bother to read Pastiche now and again.”

“Only to make sure you’re not embarrassing me, or yourself.”

“Is that what you called me in for?”

President Fletcher angled a glare at him, then put his pen down and folded his hands on the polished surface of the desk. “I called you in discuss your last Pastiche party. Sit.”

Kurt rolled his eyes, but obliged. “The Tea Party? Come on, that was hilarious.”

“Do I need to remind you how many of our donors are Conservatives?”

“No non-racist, non-deranged donor is gonna care that we mocked them. And if they can’t take a joke, fuck them _and_ their money. The Hancocks alone could keep this place afloat.”

“The Hancocks are the ones who complained.” 

At that, Kurt leaned back in his chair, a vague smirk playing about his face. Sam would have a field day with this if she found out… “ _Seriously?_ They’re in bed with the Tea Party? I thought they _looooved_ brown people. They make it rain on African orphans like they’re high-rollers in a strip club.”

“They like _brown people_ just fine,” President Fletcher grumbled. “As long as they can control them. Now, you’re going to watch yourself in future. Because everybody else is watching you. And there’s a lot more at stake than your right to piss people off.”  

Those were the words that echoed in his mind as he walked into Garmin one night and found the DWP party raging; Sam White in the midst of it, camera rolling.  

“I didn’t do this. Sam. I had nothing to do with this.”

 Not entirely true, but he wanted her to believe him anyway. Needed her to.

Sam said nothing, watching him through the lens instead. And that, more than anything, got to him…

Kurt would _not_ take the heat for this. Especially not after it turned out that _she_ set the whole thing in motion. Sure, she talked a good game about how the invitation should have been met with scorn and derision, instead of dozens of people showing up with posters and costumes and decorations. But the fact remained that none of this would have happened if she'd just left well enough alone. And now Kurt was screwed socially, unless he found _somebody_ to back him up. Somebody with enough clout on campus to convince everyone that this wasn't all his fault...

When he approached Troy at their row crew mixer, Kurt didn’t really plan for a no. In fact he was kind of counting on a yes. There was no Plan B. So he didn't have much choice but to follow his frienemy out into the night, ready to pretty much beg for a social pardon...

Instead he got leverage, in the form of their newly elected President hooking up with their very engaged, supposedly gay African-American Studies Professor.

Kurt didn't like having to play that card. But he figured Troy of all people would understand that sometimes you had to do underhanded shit to get your dad off your back…

 

*******

 

“ _…I’m pregnant. With the President’s… **clone!**_ ”

Popcorn went flying at the screen, and a chorus of boos and jeers drowned out the next bits of dialogue, as AP House made their feelings known about the latest Defamation plot twist.

Coco laughed a little and looked to Sam, who managed a smile.

Between Kurt trolling her town hall protest, Gabe breaking up with her and Troy getting arrested, it had been a long, shitty night. As the episode came to an end, and the students dispersed, Sam found that her brain was tired but her body was all hopped up on adrenaline. 

“You wanna go for a walk?”

“I wanna curl up in bed and cry,” Coco murmured, and Sam wasn’t sure if she was joking or not. Either way she felt compelled to hug her, so she did, only letting go when she felt the other girl start to…

The Blakey graduate quad was eerily quiet and especially shadowy at this hour. It also happened to be where Gabe lived (not that she was hoping to run into him or anything). As she wandered across, Sam felt a begrudging gratitude for campus security (the non-bigoted, non-gun-wielding type). There weren’t a lot of places in the good old US of A where a black girl could walk around alone without fear of-

 “ _Sharpton_.”

Sam shrieked, whipping round to see that it was just Kurt. She still wanted to punch him in the throat, though.

“What the _fuck?_  You scared the shit outta me.”

“My bad. I saw you walking alone so I...followed." 

“Well… _don’t_ next time,” she snapped, turning around and striding ahead.  

Instead of taking that as his cue to leave her alone, Kurt fell in step beside to her. “Hey, did you get a chance to read Lionel’s article?”

Not in all the chaos, no. But it would have to wait until morning because - “I can’t with the politics right now. I’m too tired.”

“You’re out power-walking at midnight, you can’t be _that_ tired.”  

Sam uttered a sound somewhere between annoyance and acquiescence. “What do you want, Kurt?”

“To talk about the Hancocks. We have to stop them.”

Sam scoffed and stopped in her tracks, peering up at him. The quad was dim and dewy, illuminated by sparse light from the surrounding buildings – but she could just about make out what seemed to be sincerity in his eyes. “ _We?_ Since when do you care about protecting AP House?”  

“Since I realized that the Hancocks have way too much power and influence, and they’re wielding it in increasingly insidious ways. You know they gave Pastiche a tough time too? They didn’t like that we threw a Tea Party party.”

Ah, the one where they dressed up as infamous conservative men and women, drank tequila out of teacups, and ran around with signs saying stuff like ‘THE WHITE HOUSE. NO COLORS ALLOWED’. 

“So you only care now that it mildly inconveniences you,” Sam surmised with narrowed eyes.

“I care about what you care about.”                                                        

“Because you’re a spoiled, self-involved little troll who gets off on mocking people that actually have the guts to-”

 She should’ve seen it coming. Right around _I care about what you care_ _about_ he got this look on his face. This dopey, open-hearted, _please notice me_ look. The same one he had at the protest, when he talked about how they could have been allies. The same one he had at the blackface party, when he was trying to tell her what she already knew…

She didn’t get it back then. She didn’t get what he really wanted out of this. But when he stepped into her space and took hold of her waist, ducking down to kiss her, it all came together like a game of Tetris.                     

In the seconds after, Sam noticed that he looked about as shocked as she felt. He let go of her like she burned him, taking a big step back. Seconds stretched out into an entire torturous minute before she finally found words to put to the moment…

“ _Are you fucking kidding me?!_ ”

 “Shit. Sam, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-”

“ _That’s_ what this was about?”

“…what what was about?”

“You dogging me for _everything_ I do since the day I met you. Launching your politically incorrect crusade to discredit me and the BSU. Pretending to want to help against the Hancocks now? I mean…do you actually believe in _anything_ , or were you just being contrarian to get my attention? Did you support AP House being integrated because you wanted to _live with me?_ ”

“… _wow_ ,” he said, in an almost awestruck tone of voice. “You are _so_ conceited.”

“Says the guy who just kissed me!”

“The fact that I kissed you doesn’t mean I’m _obsessed_ with you,” he pointed out, sounding infuriatingly calm. He was coming to his senses, reverting to dismissive douchebag mode. “It just means that I’m into you.”

“ _Ugh_ ,” Sam uttered in disgust, turning to go back the way she came.

  
“Come on, you’ve never thought about it?” he asked, trailing her at a safe distance.

 She leveled a look at him that answered the question well enough.

“Well, _I’ve_ thought about it, obviously. Especially after you broke your ‘never fall for the oppressor’ rule with Gabe Mitchell, who – _while we’re on the subject_ – looks like a character from a CW show about Jesus.”

Sam whipped round with murder in her eyes, and he stopped abruptly. “First of all, Gabe is _twice_ the man you are. Second, we might have broken up, but you are the last-”

“You broke up?”

“The _last_ guy on this campus I’d **ever** consider being with.”

If he was at all hurt by that he didn’t show it. In fact he looked like he didn’t quite believe her. “ _The last?_ You sure about that? Because there are some _pre-tty grody_ guys on – Sam, wait, no. Don’t go. Just hear me out first, please.” There it was again. That look. Sam wanted to slap it off his face, but she was also kind of curious about what he would say next. If nothing else it would make a great story for Coco and Joelle…

“So I’m the last guy you’d ever consider being with, fine, whatever. But I meant it when I said I care about what you care about. I meant it when I said we’d be a good team. And not because I want to get with you, although – full disclosure – I do. It’s because I think you’re right about a lot of what’s going on here. Which isn't to say that you don't have a tendency to get _super_ sanctimonious over literally everything for no reason. Like that giant blog post you wrote arguing that _Gremlins_ is really about suburban white fear of black culture?”

“The Gremlins are loud, they’re addicted to fried chicken, they talk in slang and _they freak out when you get their hair wet_.”

“ _See?_ ” he demanded, with a weird exasperated sort of fondness in his eyes. It made her uncomfortable and she found herself looking away, but not leaving. “That right there. You can’t expect me to _not_ make fun of that.”

“We’ve got bigger problems now, Kurt.”

“I know. The way those campus cops treated Reggie, and Troy…the Hancocks’ history of targeting Armstrong-Parker. I’m a privileged asshole, but maybe I can help make other privileged assholes understand why this matters.”

She looked up at him, scanning his eyes for a hint of insincerity or ill intention. Maybe her defenses were down, maybe her radar was off. Regardless, she couldn’t find the lie just yet.

Sam knew how to handle trolls, had learned to dismantle them without breaking a sweat. But she never figured out how to effectively fight Kurt. Maybe it was time for a different strategy…

“So what say you, Sharpton? Dear White Pastiche? Dear Pasty White People?”

Sam rolled her eyes skywards, then back down to his stupid face, and sighed. “ _We can do better than that_.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Kurt is clearly obsessed with Sam, right?! The movie version of the character was fixated on making Lionel miserable (a fic for another day lol), but the TV version is just a little too invested in Sam. Literally everywhere she goes, he’s there, trying to get a rise out of her. Even when she’s not around he brings her up, like during the party where Reggie gets a gun pulled on him...
> 
> He's just a little boy with a crush, pulling her pigtails to get her attention :p
> 
> Anywho, I hope you enjoyed! It was inspired by the movie, but mostly the TV show, both of which I have watched way too many times. Title taken from ‘You Fit Into Me’ by Margaret Atwood.


End file.
